My blog posts have always come in waves, ever since I started this blog 11 years ago. I’ll post for a few days straight, then nothing for weeks. And every couple years, I’ll declare that I’m determined to fix this broken pattern, and I’ll start blogging again nearly every day. It doesn’t last.
What I finally realized is that I have to be serious about posting every single day. If even one day slips by, the whole thing breaks down and I’ll fall back into ignoring it, because there’s the added friction of wanting to post something “great” to make up for the missed days.
If you subscribe to the RSS feed, you’ll notice that I’ve now been posting once or twice every day for about a week and a half. I don’t link to all of these posts from App.net, so here’s the recent ones you might have missed:
App Store old app maintenance:
“But if apps are an art form, an important part of our culture, then it shouldn’t require so much work to make sure they don’t disappear forever, so quickly.”
“I got into the Mac in the 1990s during the lead-up to Apple’s certain doom, so I spent quite a lot of time arguing with Windows users.”
“So it’s a good time to move away, to a company that I can pick based on merits and attitude and not just because it was the default choice.”
“Apple’s aggressive releases add even more anxiety about updating apps to keep up with the latest APIs and hardware.”
“It’s a reminder to me that great things can start small, unambitious. I never would’ve guessed that a web comic artist starting so plainly would later produce a single strip that’s so incredible.”
“In this post I’m going to briefly review 3 of the most popular iPhone clients: Netbot, Felix, and Riposte. You can’t really go wrong with any of these three apps.”
“Yesterday Dave Winer and Kyle Shank launched Little Outliner, an impressive JavaScript outliner that uses HTML5 local storage.”
Apple and the impression of being small:
“But too many voices also creates noise, and noise makes simple things messy, confusing. Apple still gives the impression of being smaller than they really are because our view of them is heavily filtered.”
“While I was writing my review of ADN clients, I wondered aloud if Riposte or Felix or some other app entirely was the first to support swiping to move the text cursor. It seems a nice enough trick that someone should get credit for trying it first.”
“Pretty sure we hit a tipping point in the iCloud just doesn’t work narrative this week. Whether that judgement is fair or not, Apple should drop everything to focus on making iCloud totally robust in time for WWDC.”
“Toward the end of this week’s Core Intuition, we talked a little about the App.net file storage API and mentioned the new iPhone app Climber.”
“Using Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn exclusively for your content is like an artist who picks their own colors but still stays within the lines of a paint-by-numbers kit. A domain name is your own canvas.”
“This article from Macworld is important because it will serve as a sort of Hotline software ‘about page’ for future internet searchers.”
Searchpath invoices and automation:
“Then life and other work got in the way, and weeks later I still hadn’t shipped it. I wanted it to be completely perfect and automated, so that I never had to think about it.”
I also got tired of the non-retina (and outdated tag-line) of the old header. I’ve started over with a plain blog design, finally dropping HTML tables for layout (!) in favor of Bootstrap CSS. A more complete new design will follow later.
